Chapter Text
Skin.
Skin can be so soft, so warm. God she feels so warm, she actually likes him. He can't believe she actually likes him, does it always feel like this? Are girls meant to be this soft?
He's learning here, and now, that sometimes skin is hard. Hard like the pavement cracking against the back of his head. Hard with bone so close to the surface connecting again and again. Knuckle meets cheek. Force follows through. Skull meets concrete.
Fight back, fight back dammit. Harrington's don't break, perfect and crystalline. Impenetrable.
He can't, he's not really there. Sometime between the first punch and the last there is some piece of himself popping out of place with a nonexistent snick. Skull meets concrete and suddenly he isn't real. He isn't there. There's yelling, Nancy begging Jonathan to stop. Fuck, his head hurts.
No shit Harrington.
He doesn't remember the rest of the day.
He's standing at the edge of awake, a quiet sort of consciousness, smoky and not quite anchored enough to realize it's time for the day to begin.
Dad's home.
He wakes up, groaning into the pillow. His head hurts. Scratch that, everything from the waist up hurts. Nothing to do about it but wait till it's over. Pain like this is new but like mom says, all things new are to be handled accordingly. Not that he knows what "accordingly" means in this scenario. Whatever. The world keeps spinning or something like that.
The sight that greets him as he steps into the bathroom to prepare for the school-day freezes him in the doorway. The face in the mirror is littered with yellow bruising deepening to purple at the edges, split lip, busted nose, one eye completely swollen shut and scratched to all hell.
What the fuck?
"Dad!" his voice cracks -cracking against pavement.- his panicked confusion must carry as soon there is a rustle of noise from the kitchen and the scrambling of feet coming up the stairs, his father bursting into the room with creased brows. Eyes frantically sweeping around the room until Dane Harrington see's his son stood at the threshold of his en suite restroom. He crosses the distance in four long strides, hands coming to rest on Steve's shoulders, head lowering to meet eyes.
Get off of me Hagan!
"Stephen what happened, who did this to you? Did you see any faces?" His fathers hands come up, fingers lightly pressing at the gash cresting across his nose, and another through one of his eyebrows. What happened? Steve doesn't know what happened. He was with-
Jonathan stop you're hurting him!
Jonathan. Jonathan and Nancy. Fuck he'd said all of those things about the missing Byers kid and there had been-
You're both assholes! Just forget it, we're done.
A moment, two more to feel real again, to remember the rage that seemed to boil the air of that alleyway as Jonathan's fist connected again and again. His vision focuses and locks onto his dads worried expression, his hands back on his shoulders. Warm.
"Just a kid from school," Steve winces, his busted lip pulling with the expression "It's fine, it was the missing kid's older brother, he's going through a lot right now." His fathers expression falters, still worried but no longer so severe. A sentry at tentative rest. Then his eyes narrow again, looking over Steve again with a different lens in place. Well shit.
"Will Byers, I heard," his hands tighten around Steve's shoulders, not enough to hurt but enough pressure to sense the oncoming reproach, "what the hell did you say to his brother to get so thoroughly thrashed?"
Steve snorts, and like mist the tension fades into nothingness. The pain of his wrinkling nose is worth it to see the smirk begin to play at the edge of his fathers expression.
"Thrashed, dad, really? I don't think people call getting their asses handed to them getting thrashed anymore." His father, fully smiling at this point, brushes his hands up and down Steve's arms for a moment before nodding his head.
"Sure they do, and don't think you've effectively dodged the question. I still wanna know what you said to the poor boy," his hands finally drop from Steve's person as he moves over to open the cabinet under the sink, "you keep your first-aid kit stocked and up to snuff?"
"Yeah of course," He's never let himself run out of peroxide, gauze or any of the other necessities his parents had taught him to keep readily available when they first moved to Hawkins when he was five. "And I'd really rather not say dad, it was... it was bad. There was graffiti, and Nancy has been hanging around with Jonathan. He was taking pictures and To-"
Pain lances across his brow radiating backwards across the dome of his skull, like an ice-cold razor shaving the most central parts of him. Not physical pain, not from the wounds littering his face and torso. The pain of something missing. It hurts. It hurts.
A boy and a girl. Freckled face and perfectly tended hair. The image of them, so crystalline clear, is shattered and sanded to the finest particles. Gone.
He's not real, and neither are they. A half-truth smothered and sundered and scattered by pain so alien and so sharp it makes his eyes water. He blinks, he's here with his dad who has come back to stand in front of him and is pressing a cotton-swab soaked in something that makes Steve's teeth clench with the sting to the wound across Steve's eyebrow. His father looking between his eyes, a new type of worry creasing his face. Something more intense than how he looked when he saw his son's wounded face.
"Do you need to stay home from school today Steven? Do I need to call your mother? Take you to the hospital?" His ministrations with the swab moving down to Steve's nose as he barrages his son with questions. "Where'd you go just now?"
A jolt travels up Steve's spine. Calling his mom when she's away on business is never a good call and a trip to the hospital is even more of a no-go. Staying home from school sounds... tempting honestly, but he really needs to find and apologize to Jonathan and Nancy. Shit he needs to go clean off the theater board. "I'm okay dad, swear it. I just really need to get some stuff sorted and everything will be fine. No need to call mom. Swear it, scouts honor, cross my heart..." He trails off, trying to smile reassuringly for his dad. It seems to work by the way his fathers shoulders ease down, still tending to his son's wounds but obviously close to finishing the light taps of the swab.
"If you're sure, kid, just... be careful please. You know your mother and I worry about you, but we don't want to make too much noise around here okay? I know we've been here a while now but still, quiet never hurt anybody." The pitying smile he sends Steve with a pat on the shoulder is nothing new and disheartening as ever. "Now I'll get out of your hair so you can do your hair."
The sound of his bedroom door closing starts his internal timer. Ten seconds to let his mind sift through all the noise.
Breath in.
Like folding laundry, towels and t-shirts. He takes all the tides of doubt and shame, all the thoughts telling him he's fucked up again. That he'll never be as happy as his father or as capable as his mother. That his place in the Harrington house is an interruption in the harmony of the space. That he's losing Nancy, his girlfriend, the first person to make him really feel human. How angry he still is that Jonathan was creeping on them and he's just supposed to forgive and forget. How he woke up this morning and knows that sometime since the crack of pavement and this morning that he's lost his two-
Breath out.
The halls of Hawkins High feel cavernous even as he moves through the crowds of students preparing for first period at their lockers or loitering with their friends, shoulders brush his and eyes track the wounds he knows he deserved, but he doesn't feel close to any of these people. The reality of physical proximity means nothing through the barriers of glittering wealth and uncross-able distance he's so carefully erected. He moves through the halls and everyone moves around him, path unbroken as he searches for the only person that has managed to reach out and find him behind the armor and weapons of social war he's been trained to wield since he could speak. Boy does he find her.
He finds her where he'd been secretly praying she wouldn't be, shoulder-to-shoulder, heads leaned close whispering to the person he's already losing her to. The world around him quiets, lockers slamming and so many conversations fading as he watches Nancy and Jonathan share whatever ephemeral thing they seem to have in common that he so obviously lacks. In this moment he knows -just knows- that nothing he says to either of them will reach them. His name hasn't crossed their minds since the theater and the pavement and the bloodied fists. His mom has tried explaining that thing to him, object prominence or something, that part of your brain that recognizes something exists even when you aren't looking at it. He doesn't feel real, he feels inconsequential to the girl who has been his anchor since she first called him an idiot in that fondly exasperated way that means Beautiful and Nancy Wheeler in his mind.
As if feeling his eyes Nancy looks over her shoulder and meets Steve's gaze. Yet he still doesn't feel real. She's looking right at him, and her eyes crinkle at the corner with some emotion he's never been able to name, like he's something to be made time for later. Something not for right now -Put a pin in that darling- and it makes his teeth ache. Makes that same cold-sharp pain begin to prod at his temples. The world fades back in with the shrill ring of a bell signalling the official start of the school day. Maybe his dad was right, maybe he should have stayed home.
In an effort to escape the gaze of Nancy Wheeler, to start to feel real again, he turns on his heel and walks right back through the double-wide front doors of Hawkins High.
He doesn't pay much mind to where his feet take him, around the school, past the bleachers, only really pulled from the depths of whatever fugue he'd been in when he feels the snap of a twig beneath his shoe. Sensation comes back to him slowly, the color of fallen leaves and the bite of November air grounding him. He's never particularly minded the cold, the shivers and gooseflesh something he's been familiar with for as long as he can remember. Not quite so noticeable to him as warmth is, something he's forced to recognize when the foreign comfort washes over him.
His musings over temperature -airhead- are interrupted by the sudden uproar of a voice nearby. The volume of it makes him jolt in place, it doesn't sound mad, just loud and... off somehow. Masculine and projected but edged with what sounds like manufactured gruffness, slurred sounding like talking while you have a thermostat in your mouth. Steve has never considered himself a particularly curious person but without thinking his body guides him towards the voice.
What he finds is... not a drunk in the woods like he'd expected but a boy standing on a beat-up picnic table in the middle of a small clearing, one arm aloft holding a broken ruler with two square erasers tucked in front of his canines behind his bottom lip, a wild mane of curly dark brown hair shaking just above his shoulders as he swings the ruler wildly. The absurdity of the spectacle pulls a laugh from him before he can even think to reign it in, a hand shooting up to cover his mouth before he can get carried away. Unfortunately watching the boy jump in place and promptly fall off the top of the table, hitting his elbow on the seat on his way down, makes him want to laugh just as much as it kicks him into action.
"Holy shit are you okay?" Steve is across the clearing kneeling down next to the boy on instinct. "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to scare you I just-" but before he can even finish his explanation the other boy is jumping to his feet, pulling the remaining eraser from his mouth -as the other had escaped sometime during his fall- and wiping the dirt and leaf-litter from his jeans and denim vest.
He doesn't even look at Steve before he begins speaking. "I'm good! Totally, I- uh meant to do that," a nervous laugh bubbles through the air and he finally looks down and meets Steve's eyes -Brown and deep, wood in a fireplace. Warm.- a flash of recognition and the strange boys expression shutters. "Oh, Harrington, come to make the jester dance or just lookin' for some party favors?" The tone mocking and not one bit curious, a question asked with no real desire for an answer.
Just like that, another microscopic fracture and all warmth escapes him. Harrington. His own weapon of a name turned against him. Wielded so effectively by someone he doesn't even recognize. He pushes off the ground to stand eye to eye with boy, presumably a classmate, feeling the plates and facets of the King close up around him. Peripherally, he recognizes that he's still worried that the boy is injured, but none of that matters now. He's so tired of being the one getting hurt. The flashpoint urge to do his worst to people has already gotten his face beat in once this week, he still has to atone for what he said to Jonathan, still needs to beg for Nancy to forgive him so he doesn't lose her so soon -we don't even have to move yet, I can still have her for a little longer- but it's all secondary to the sheets of frigidity layering over his mind. Fuck it.
It feels like the sharpness of his mothers nails as they rest across his shoulder, not painful, just present. Dangerous by nature but never truly pointed at him. It feels good.
He's of a height with the boy, maybe a bit taller, but holding eye contact is no problem as he tilts his head and squints. Examining something small and strange. "I was looking for somewhere quiet, hadn't really expected to find someone playing pretend in the woods. A little old for make-believe don't you think?" The words are a broken camera at his feet, the slow and steady art of turning something someone loves into something they should feel ashamed of. Steve gives him no time to breath much less respond, taught to hit first and hit hard. "And should I know you? Or do I just frequently feature in your little daydreams?"
The boy pales and flushes bright red just as quickly, shoulders shaking with indignation as his fists clench, one hand still wrapped around the broken ruler he'd been swinging around not even five minutes ago. For a moment Steve thinks he's about to get stabbed by a school utensil before a thought flashes across his mind -He's a coward, he couldn't hurt a fly much less me- and he doesn't know the boy but he knows the thought to be true. The boy begins to shake his head, apparently not willing take Steve's barbs laying down. "Oh that's rich Harrington-"
"True." Steve interrupts, hands coming up to rest on his hips as he looks the boy up and down. Ratty shoes, probably a size too small -can't afford new ones- "but, can't really say the same for you though can I? I don't think you're in a tax bracket high enough to even be looking at me. Scram freak, go find somewhere else to lose your mind."
The boys eyes get glassy at that, and Steve feels some of this persona fragment. He's made people cry before, he thinks he's even relished in it with some foggy faced crowd laughing with him -a boy with freckles encouraging him- but if he's the reason that tears fall in this quiet pocket of the world where a poor boy just wanted to escape he thinks he might break. All at once his armor cracks, the blades of his words dull and rust in his mouth and he feels less than human. Feels like it doesn't fucking matter if he has more money than the boy when Steve is the one who's so clearly miserable. He's back in his room, his dad's warm hands running up and down his arms. He's at the Wheeler house, enclosed in warmth from all sides as he holds a teddy bear and does a silly voice for the girl he thinks he's starting to love. He thinks of sharp nails and bright, bright blue eyes looking down at him curiously and finally realizes that he was born for coldness. That he is a heat-stealer and joy was not meant for him.
"Fuck, I'm sorry, Jesus. I- you can stay."
Not meeting the boys warm -He was having so much fun- eyes Steve runs, and the wind-bite feels like just the beginning.